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| Volume XI, Winter 2004, Number 4 |
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| Book Review Excerpts |
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REVIEW ESSAY: All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, by Stephen Kinzer. John Wiley and Sons, 2003. 258 pages, with notes, bibliography and index. $24.95, hardcover; $14.95, paperback.
Masoud Kazemzadeh
Assistant professor, Department of Political Science, Utah Valley State College
To say that Iran has posed challenging foreign-policy problems for the United States since the Carter administration is an understatement. From the intense anti-Americanism and the hostage crisis during the Carter presidency to the Iran-contra scandal of the Reagan years to regime change and the Axis of Evil of President Bush, Iran-U.S. relations seem both bizarre and inexplicable. One book that provides an explanation of the roots of the problem is Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men.
Although this book has been reviewed in numerous publications, including Middle East Policy (Vol. X, No. 4, 2003), virtually all of the reviews have been written for the general public. In this article, I will discuss several issues of significance for scholars and policy makers that have not been addressed in any of the above-mentioned reviews. There is little doubt of the high quality of Kinzer's contributions. For example, The Economist selected this book as one of its ten "Books of the Year in 2003" in history; one of the principal textbooks in political science has quoted it as a main source on the 1953 coup; and many graduate and undergraduate courses in the United States and abroad have made it required reading. Kinzer's book was quickly translated into Farsi in Iran without the permission of the author. The translation was poorly done with self-censorship or state censorship of many passages.1
Stephen Kinzer, a senior correspondent for The New York Times, has covered more than 50 countries and has published books on Guatemala, Nicaragua and Turkey. All the Shah's Men reads more like a Tom Clancy novel than a scholarly work; at first glance, one might even take it for a screenplay. But this should not detract from the serious contributions Kinzer makes. The book is not a journalistic recounting of events with superficial explanations. Kinzer's book presents essential information and raises important questions for international-relations scholars interested in U.S. policy towards Iran.
Kinzer makes seven salient points. The first is that the 1953 coup was an American plot, not a spontaneous uprising by the Iranian people to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, though both the American government and the former monarchy have propagated this myth. Virtually all politically active Iranians knew about the role of the United States and Britain in the 1953 coup, but the U.S. government and the Iranian regime under the monarchy tried to conceal that information, and Islamic fundamentalists have tried to suppress scholarship on their role. It is therefore not surprising that criticism of Kinzer's book has come from these quarters.
1 Many sentences have been completely deleted and many mistranslated. The following phrase under the picture of Ayatollah Kashani has been deleted: "Kermit Roosevelt sent him [Ayatollah Kashani] $10,000 the day before the coup." The endnotes and bibliography have been deleted, as was the subtitle. As an introduction to the translation, the review of Kinzer's book by Warren Bass in The New York Times, August 10, 2003, has been modified and presented without acknowledging the author of the review and instead attributing it to Abdolreza Mahdavi. See Azadi, No. 31-32, Summer-Fall 1382, 2003, pp. 271-272, http://www.azadi-iran.org. This journal is published by the National Democratic Front of Iran, headed by Hedayat Matin-Daftari, Mossadegh's grandson.
Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, by Seymour M. Hersh. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004. xix plus 370 pages, with index. $25.95, hardcover.
Michael Rubner
Professor of international relations, James Madison College, Michigan State University
About one year after the United States launched the war against Iraq, Seymour Hersh obtained photographs and a copy of a report by Major General Antonio Taguba containing graphic depictions of beatings, sexual abuse and torture heaped by American forces on helpless Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. History appears to have repeated itself for Hersh, the free-lance reporter and staff writer for The New York Times and The New Yorker, who had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for uncovering the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers. On April 30, 2004, two days after the existence of the disturbing photographs was revealed on the CBS 60 Minutes II program, Hersh broke the story of what became instantly known as the Abu Ghraib scandal.
One suspects that Chain of Command opens with a long chapter on the torture in Abu Ghraib because that prison and the dehumanizing behavior that took place within its walls stand as a metaphor for the senseless quagmire in which the United States has found itself since its invasion of Iraq in March 2003. As a stark symbol of a failed policy, the revelation of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib logically invites one to ask how and why the so-called war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11 eventually led this country into a morass in Iraq from which it cannot easily extricate itself in the foreseeable future.
Hersh's major thesis is this: "The roots of the Abu Ghraib scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists, but in the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion -- and eye-for-an-eye retribution -- in fighting terrorism." The evils that unfolded at Abu Ghraib had their origins in a secret statement, signed by President Bush on February 7, 2002, which determined that none of the Geneva Conventions would apply to terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world. Hersh provides evidence that by fall of 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and all major principals of the National Security Council had been informed that detainees at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were being abused in contravention of their rights under international law. Despite promising to investigate, Rumsfeld failed to pursue the matter.
Inside the Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia, by Thomas W. Lippman. Westview Press, 2004. 390 pages, including notes, bibliography, and index. $27.50, hardcover.
Brooks Wrampelmeier
U.S. Foreign Service officer (ret.); consul-general, Dhahran, 1987-89
In the words of Thomas Lippman, the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia has been "the ultimate marriage of convenience." For the United States, Saudi Arabia's enormous oil resources and its strong opposition to communism made it a country of great strategic importance. For the Saudis, the relationship has brought transformation of a poor desert land into an oil-rich and superficially modern state with the protection of a great if distant power against external enemies. For three quarters of a century, the two countries have cooperated closely in numerous ways despite the obvious disparity between a secular, multiethnic, open democratic society and a religiously illiberal, socially conservative, tribal and family-based Muslim Arab kingdom. Lippman, a former Middle East correspondent for The Washington Post and most recently an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute, seeks to show how "two cultures from the opposite poles of human experience came together for the benefit of both."
This is not a comprehensive history of U.S.-Saudi Arabian relations nor is it an academic study of the U.S. presence in the region. Rather, Lippman describes how over seven decades Americans, official and private, have forged mutually productive partnerships and even friendships with Saudis. Drawing on published and manuscript memoirs of Americans who have lived and worked in the kingdom, oral histories by foreign-service officers collected by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and interviews with those possessing recent knowledge of the country, the author narrates how hundreds of thousands of Americans "have succeeded and prospered in Saudi Arabia because they have mostly respected Saudi traditions and accommodated themselves to the habits and preferences of their hosts; indeed, the strong bond that has formed between Saudis and Americans has benefited both countries for decades" (p. 3). At the same time, Lippman emphasizes that despite Saudis' growing familiarity with individual Americans, our technology and our political and social institutions, Saudi society remains essentially inward-focused and traditionally Islamic. Indeed, many Saudis look to their extended family and their religion as a shield against the disruptions of modernization and globalization for which Americans have been the driving force.
Breaking Ranks, by Ronit Chacham, ed. New York: Other Press, 2003. 153 pages, with 8 maps. $25.00, hardcover.
Lawrence Davidson
Professor of history, West Chester University
It is said that history is written by the victors. But it is not only history that is so written. Part of what goes into winning is the effective control of the interpretation of events as they unfold. All governments strive to manipulate the perception of events and thus control the behavior of their citizens. In general terms, here is how it happens. We live within a sociocultural paradigm that creates a template for how we see the world. This paradigm is the product of an historical process to which generations of citizens contribute. It is the source of our national self-image, the identity glue that holds communities and nations together. The paradigm can also be understood as a sea of culturally shaped information that citizens absorb through their peer groups, their educational institutions and, of course, their various forms of media. At any particular time this information flow can be slanted to reinforce particular interpretations of both historical myths and contemporary events. It is this slant that governments and their controlling elites seek to manipulate. This is not necessarily some devilish conspiracy on the part of our leaders. They too, whether operating within a democratic or authoritarian governmental environment, have been raised to see the world in terms of the community's self-image-defining and reinforcing paradigm. Leaders, as well as their allied interest groups, seek to manipulate the informational environment to further their own personal and party interests, but they usually do so as true believers.
What happens when the demands of the moment seem to lend themselves to paranoia, xenophobia and pervasive fear? At these times of high stress, it becomes possible for the elites to manipulate aspects of the prevailing paradigm to such an extent that all sense of objective reality is lost. Citizens enter into an Orwellian world wherein, for example, peace is achieved through war, state terrorism becomes a vehicle to prevent non-state terrorism, subjugation allegedly brings security, and democracy is supposed to magically arise out of policies of invasion and mass destruction. Now, leaders can fool most of the people most of the time.
But not all of the people. There will always be those who by virtue of some aspect of family history, a traumatic event, a meaningful episode of travel outside the national paradigm, or just happenstance, fail to be fully convinced by the perceptual demands of the paradigm. Most of these misfits will remain silent for fear of damaging relations with friends and family or hurting their careers. However, some will become so disaffected that, like the little boy in the story, they just can't help asserting that "the emperor is wearing no clothes."
Breaking Ranks, Ronit Chachem's moving and important collection of interviews with dissenting Israeli soldiers, gives voice to nine such outsiders. These are men who know what it means to be occupiers and oppressors and, through the trauma of their experiences, have "gradually come to question their compatriots' perception of reality" (p.13). They come to us like the Hebrew prophets with an urgent message -- something has gone very wrong in the land of Zion. Israel has become an abhorrently racist and aggressive country, and its citizens must break through the prevailing paradigm of megalomania and fear if they are to save themselves from barbarism.
The Palestinian People, A History, by Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal. Harvard University Press, 2003. 568 pages, with chronology of major events, foot notes, index. $12.57, paperback.
Philip C. Wilcox
President, Foundation for Middle East Peace
This rich and comprehensive story of the Palestinians by Baruch Kimmerling of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Joel Migdal of the University of Washington expands on their 1993 book, Palestinians, The Making of a People, with new chapters on the Israeli-Palestinians and the Oslo peace process and its collapse. An ambitious synthesis of history, political analysis, sociology and economics, it succeeds in bringing together in very readable prose the long and still incomplete Palestinian quest for unity and freedom in a state of their own.
Kimmerling and Migdal are part of the new era of historians whose work penetrates the thick layers of nationalistic myth and propaganda that have obscured understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The authors are sympathetic but not partisan toward the Palestinians, and their judgments are balanced and dispassionate. Their analysis of what went right and what went wrong with the Oslo process, which has become the subject of much partisan debate, is fresh and compelling.
The authors deplore the self-serving, idealized mythologies and mutual denial of both Israelis and Palestinians about their respective histories and their denigration of each other's legitimate claims. For example, they reject the popular notion that the Palestinians are simply a product of the confrontation of the Arab peoples of Palestine with Zionism. They argue that a sense of Palestinian identity and political self consciousness first emerged with the bloody revolt of the Arabs of Palestine in 1834 against Ibrahim Pasha's short-lived and onerous Egyptian occupation, which was ultimately turned back by the Ottomans. Ottoman co-optation of the notables and landowners whom they deputized as officials blurred a common identity. But growing trade that created interdependence between city and village, urbanization, education, the Young Turk rebellion in 1908, and the growth of an Arab press accelerated "Palestinism." Of course, Jewish immigration, the British Mandate and the Balfour Declaration greatly accelerated a sense of common identity.
Syria and the Palestinians: The Clash of Nationalisms, by Ghada Hashem Talhami. University Press of Florida, 2001. ix plus 257 pages. $55.00, hardcover.
Robert Brenton Betts
Visiting professor, The University of Balamand, Al-Kurah, Lebanon
This is the second time recently that I have had the pleasure of reviewing a book of substantial new scholarship and significant contemporary relevance by an Arab woman author. Hizbullah -- Politics and Religion, by Amal Saad-Ghorayeb (see Middle East Policy, No. 74, December 2002, pp. 176-178) broke major new ground in its examination of this vibrant political force in Lebanon, and Dr. Talhami's telling analysis of the rise of Palestinian nationalism within the wider context of the older Greater Syrian movement is an important contribution to our knowledge of political development in the region in the twentieth century. It is also a welcome and gratifyingly less polemical addition to a topic addressed thirteen years ago by Daniel Pipes's more narrowly focused and Zionist-slanted Greater Syria -- The History of an Ambition (see MEP, then Arab American Affairs, No. 35, Winter 1990-91, pp. 162-164).
The "Greater Syria" idea, first coined by the Belgian Jesuit orientalist Henri Lammens in the late nineteenth century, was politicized in the 1930s by returning Greek Orthodox Lebanese-Brazilian émigré, Antoun Saada. His Orthodox roots are important in this context since Greater Syria for him was geographically identical to the historical patriarchate of Antioch, which originally included all of today's Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Israel, as well as Cyprus and parts of southern Turkey. Never mind that Cyprus became autocephalous in 43l and Jerusalem (comprising Palestine and Jordan) a separate patriarchate twenty years later. For the Syrian National party (most commonly known by its French initials, PPS) the original boundaries of the patriarchate constituted Greater Syria, though eventually Cyprus was largely ignored because of its non-Arab (though mostly Greek Orthodox) population, and Iraq sometimes, though not always, was added, making Greater Syria equal to the ancient Fertile Crescent.
The impact of this movement on regional politics cannot be underestimated, and when coupled with the rise of the Baath party (cofounded by another Orthodox Christian, Michel Aflaq) and the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), which grew out of the loss of Palestine in 1948, it largely overshadowed an independent Palestinian nationalist movement, eventually to emerge in the late 1960s. The author gives us an excellent analysis of these confusing political developments in Chapter 8, which takes the book's subtitle, "the clash of nationalisms," as its heading. Talhami's reflections on the ANM are particularly useful since, as she points out, it has "received scant scholarly attention [until now] because of its frequent ideological transformations" (p. 167).
Nowhere were these three pan-Arab movements more active than in Syria, and after the Baath party takeover in 1965, Syria saw itself as the leader in the fight to liberate the "southern Syrians," or Palestinians, from Zionist occupation. It is not surprising, therefore, that Syria tried to discourage any separatist nationalist movement in Palestine, and, when it began to emerge in the 1960s, used every possible means to keep it under her control.
The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, by María Rosa Menocal, foreword by Harold Bloom. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2002. xviii plus 315 pages, with index; maps, pp. 22-23, 38, 48; photos, 8 pages between pp. 174-175. $26.95, hardcover.
Charles E. Butterworth
Professor of government and politics, University of Maryland
The Ornament of the World ends for all practical purposes just where Amin Maalouf's Leo the African begins, yet evokes the charm and high culture of a past Andalusia with similar imagined memories of how different religious communities once lived together in tenuous harmony. Like Fouad Ajami in The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey, Menocal describes authors and writings, aspirations and disappointments, extended families, promises, betrayals, and political scheming. Unlike Ajami, she does not delve deeply into the literature that forms the back-drop for her narrative. That is regrettable, to be sure, but her refusal to distort a literary past so as to facilitate sweeping generalizations about a complex, multilayered present more than compensate for it. Menocal's evocation of orange blossoms, luscious gardens, pristine palaces, lack of inter-denominational rivalries, and the assimilation of Islamic/Arabic culture by eighth to fifteenth century Andalusian Jews and Christians may be more imagined than factual, but it points persuasively and ever so graciously to a phenomenon scholars have long pondered. In the service of what she terms "idealism," namely, "an act of the imagination," her book allows her to frame and reply to "the ethical and aesthetic question of how we deal with the reality and history around us" (p. 265).
Menocal focuses on the new Umayyad dynasty founded in Andalusia by the prince Abd al-Rahman, an Aeneas-like figure, who fled his home and the ruins of the old Umayyad caliphate in Damascus just as the Abbasids were coming to power in 756. She follows the dynasty through its development, days of glory, great religious toleration, and gradual ignominious fall, then recounts the fanaticism and religious persecution that followed. In principle, the story ends in 1492 with the Edict of Expulsion that sealed the fate of Andalusian Jews, but Menocal carries it on to 1615 and the disappearance of Muslims as well as of Arabic and Islamic culture.
The culture, glory and tolerance so emblematic of this new dynasty are portrayed unconventionally. "Rather than retell the history of the Middle Ages, or even that of medieval Spain," Menocal has "strung together a series of miniature portraits that range widely in time and place, and that are focused on cultural rather than political events" (pp. 12-13). Her necklace consists of two introductory chapters; sixteen portraits that move in time from 786 to 1615 and in place from Cordoba to Damascus and Alexandria, back to Cordoba, and on to Toledo, Seville, and small towns in the Pyrenees; and two concluding chapters -- the final one little more than a pious attempt to bring a work published in 2002 about Arab and Islamic themes into harmony with prevailing opinions in the United States.
The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, by Richard W. Bulliet. Columbia University Press, 2004. 192 pages. $24.50, hardcover.
Mustafa Malik
Freelance journalist
What went wrong in Iraq? Bernard Lewis, the author of the book What Went Wrong? and other promoters of the Iraq war got it all wrong when they thought that Muslim societies need to be and can be remade in the Western image.
Few American intellectuals have argued this point as forcefully as Richard W. Bulliet in The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization. America's policy toward the Middle East, the author says, is driven by hubris, which has blinded its political and intellectual establishments to the cultural realities of Muslim societies. Cultural insensitivity characterized the American missionary campaign in Muslim lands prior to World War II. It was a colossal failure. That blinding hubris now threatens to undermine the so-called "war of freedom against tyranny" (p. 119) in the Middle East, of which Iraq is supposed to be the first phase.
Bulliet's refreshing insights into Muslim societies derives from extensive fieldwork in the Middle East that began a half-century ago. His substantive research on different facets of Islamic civilization has produced several titles that are both highly readable and intellectually nourishing. A professor at Columbia University, the author says U.S. policy in the Muslim world betrays a naïve aspiration to be loved by others. The problem is that those who proclaim that aspiration want Muslims to love them "for our values" without entertaining the "thought of loving them for their values" (p. 116). This mindset stems from the notion that the West has found the ultimate recipe for happiness and fulfillment, not just for Westerners, but for all humanity. This Orientalist perspective was the hallmark of the Middle East studies program launched during the Cold War. The avowed purpose of the program was to win "hearts and minds" in the Middle East, where Soviet communism had posed an ideological challenge to America. The Americans who participated in that program seldom bothered to inquire about the values and aspirations of Arabs and Muslims and were firmly convinced, as Daniel Lerner famously put it, that "what the West is . . . the Middle East seeks to become" (p. 104).
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